ONE LAW FOR ALL

In the lead up to the 2014 election campaign, certain political parties are again calling for the removal of all race-based legal privileges which have historically advantaged Maori and made us the contemporary envy of all those who cry, “One Law for All!”

Ironically, we back that call 100%.  For example, why shouldn't all other races in this country get the same historical privileging that Maori got under the 1847 Education Ordinance whereby ours is still the only race in this country to have had our children forced to learn in a ‘foreign’ language in order to receive less government education subsidies than their English counterparts.  Let everyone, regardless of race, experience that historical privilege and its contemporary legacy.

There’s more.  Why should ours be the only race in this nation to have enjoyed, under the Maori Prisoners Trials Act 1879 and the Maori Prisoners Detention Act 1880, the historical privileging of being indefinitely imprisoned without trial?  The impact of those legal privileges continues to resonate to this day.  Would it not be fair to ensure all other races get to enjoy how it feels?

Maori are also happy to forego our historical privileging as the only race, under the Crown and Native Lands Rating Act 1882, to have had all our lands within five miles of a road specially rated to build more roads that we didn’t ask for, want or use?  All land owners in these shaky isles should be similarly privileged under their own specially named race-based laws.

And why should only Maori have been historically privileged, under the Maori Affairs Amendment Act 1967, to have had large tracts of our remaining lands declared ‘uneconomic’ and compulsorily converted into Crown land?  That’s another privilege to which every race should have equal access.

It’s not just historical privileging Maori are happy to relinquish.  One contemporary race-based legal privilege we’re keen to share is that of being legally limited to selling our lands to ‘preferred classes of alienees’ as per Te Ture Whenua Maori Act 1993. 

We’re also happy to share the race-based legal privilege we enjoy, under the Treaty of Waitangi Act, of getting a maximum of 3% of the value of our stolen property returned to us.  And we especially urge the removal of all laws privileging us as the only race in New Zealand able to receive exactly $0 in compensation for our stolen property.  Why wouldn’t every property owner in this fair land want to enjoy these, as well as a myriad of other similar race-based legal privileges? 

 

All irony aside, at the core of the 1law4all call is a marrow-deep terror amongst its inventors that, as Maori rise from beneath their colonising thumb, we will have the power to do to them what they did to us.

I think they fear that even more than they fear the boogieman of contemporary Chinese colonisation and what that might mean for them in terms of ‘one law for all.’